silent_water [she/her]

FOSS hacks the copyright system to build a software commons independent of corporation, guaranteeing the freedoms of users and developers - what part of that statement isn’t political?

how can privacy ever be stripped of political content? it’s inherently about social forces - ie politics.

vegan archbishop also sounds pretty cool but then people are gonna assume you’re catholic

nix overall is a much better solution to this problem.

oh briar looks promising. I’ve been looking for a simple e2ee chat app that doesn’t involve the internet. thanks!

no joke it’s how I learned linux, bootstrapping a gentoo install from the toolchain on up, with a printed manual. it’s surprisingly effective, if time-consuming (took me about 2 weeks to get to a booted system, though most of that was compilation time - took ages back then).

literally every other distribution can solve this problem but Ubuntu can’t?

I think one of the issues with nixos learning materials is that they eschew talking about how to write your own packages. but to really understand anything, you have to get your head around writing and modifying packages. in nix, a package is just a build step that can do I/O during particular phases and produces an output to the nix store, so they’re an essential building block for anything that isn’t utterly trivial.

the other major stumbling block is working out how modules (the things that let you write config for the system) can actually be composed. adding a new module to imports gives you new config params you can set so you can organize your system config in terms of modules and packages to make things work the way you like.

Nix Pills are the canonical learning material for packages. I don’t know of any good learning material for modules - I learned by working on nixpkgs and another involved project that made extensive use of modules.

lastly, nix config files are written in the nix language and it’s a bit idiosyncratic. it almost looks and feels like Haskell but it’s slightly different in important ways. there’s no way around learning it if you have multiple systems and want to share config between them.

proper earbuds will block out most everything. get ones that actually fit into your canal and play something you’d rather hear. when I put mine in, I literally can’t hear anything but my music.

kids are people, but yeah, point stands

To those passengers who got mad, you know what I think: Fuck you!

based

heartbreaking, the worst person you know made a great point

yep stuck on Xorg forever gang

dear god if I could just run xmonad and dmenu on windows or mac I’d hate employers that tried to force me to use one or the other so much less.

when you say “something is not properly supported” what do you mean? like nvidia/amd haven’t released graphics drivers yet for linux? or some peripheral isn’t recognized?

basically, by buying new hardware just after it launches, you’re effectively one of the very first people to boot that hardware with linux. you can usually make it work but most hardware manufacturers don’t work with the linux devs to make sure support is in place. so devs have to get ahold of the hardware retail and then fix whatever is broken. the exception to this is AMD and Intel - both companies have people working on linux so they will merge support for new hardware into the kernel before that new hardware is even announced to the public. so if you stick to cpus and video cards from those two manufacturers, you’ll make your linux life easier.

even then, though, the support might exist in the latest version of the kernel, but the last Ubuntu or Mint release is still several versions behind. so you’re effectively forced to use a distro that releases updates much faster (ie rolling release), or be willing to make modifications to the system post-install to get it to work.

tl;dr: you’ve got a constellation of requirements that can’t all be met at the same time. either give it 3 to 6 months after release of new hardware or be willing to learn how to make it work. expecting software to work with hardware it hasn’t yet been designed to work with is always going to be a recipe for failure.

more stuff just works, if it doesn’t, you might be able to fix it but it’s rough.

it’s sunk cost bias. I have this trying to use windows or macos, after using linux exclusively for half my life - everything feels foreign and frustrating, with an obnoxious amount of UX patterns you’re expected to know in order to find anything. ugh, I could rant for hours on how obtuse macos is (mainly because I have to interact with it for work right now - if you force me to use windows, I’ll rant about that too)

updates invariably break things, whatever we do. the safety net of being able to roll back makes taking updates a lot more palatable.

yeah, like I said it has a learning curve so it’s not for everyone but it’s been a lifesaver for me so I thought I’d point it out.

did they ever start backporting security patches? I know that was a major issue in the early days that really soured me on the competence of the project. you cannot take a rolling release distro, bless some package versions as “stable” and call it a day.

nixos solves this problem by allowing you to boot the last working system state prior to updates. and as a bonus you can manage all of your computers from a single config in a git repo. bit of a learning curve but it takes most of the annoyance out of linux for me.